Heruka Vajrasattva Tsog

This Heruka Vajrasattva Tsog practice, written by Lama Thubten Yeshe, consists of a series of requesting verses combined with the recitation of the hundred-syllable mantra of Vajrasattva. All are welcome to participate. The yoga method of Heruka Vajrasattva has the power to purify all negative energy, which is the main thing preventing us from actualizing the path to enlightenment. This impure energy creates both physical and mental hindrances, and also leaves certain imprints. When you feel that you cannot meditate—there are too many interruptions, you cannot do anything, you cannot solve your problems—remember that there is something else you can do to remove obstacles to your progress: purification. Combining insight meditation with a powerful purification practice, such as the yoga method of Heruka Vajrasattva, helps ensure that you will gain the realizations you seek without frustration.

This Heruka Vajrasattva practice includes tsog: an offering ceremony that represents assembling all of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas in a visualization of a sacred dance. Tsog means “gathering” or “assembly,” and in this practice, it is often rendered as “pure offering.” However, the actual tsog is one’s meditation on transcendental, blissful wisdom. The entire purpose of offering tsog is to generate the experience of this blissful wisdom within oneself and to overcome the ordinary appearance and conception of sensory objects. Because the offering of tsog is a profound method for transcending mundane thought, the entire practice assists us in going beyond our ordinary experience of subject and object.